Sam Kean Quotes & Sayings

Entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe finally figured out how to separate aluminum from minerals cheaply and also how to produce it on an industrial scale. — Sam Kean

I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses. — Sam Kean

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality. — Sam Kean

Atoms consist of a positive nucleus and negative electrons flying around outside it. Electrons closest to the nucleus feel a strong negative-on-positive tug, and the bigger atoms get, the bigger the tug. In really big atoms, electrons whip around at speeds close to the speed of light. — Sam Kean

Atoms of Element 118 fill an outer shell with electrons, creating a special type of element called a noble gas. Noble gases are natural turning points on the table, ending one row and pointing to the next. — Sam Kean

Mutations can arise anywhere in the genome, in gene DNA and noncoding DNA alike. But mutations to genes have bigger consequences: They can disable proteins and kill a creature. — Sam Kean

America was probably Europe's equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpassed it after the chaos of World War II. — Sam Kean

Think of the most fussy science teacher you ever had. The one who docked your grade if the sixth decimal place in your answer was rounded incorrectly; who tucked in his periodic table T-shirt, corrected every student who said "weight" when he or she meant "mass", and made everyone, including himself, wear goggles even while mixing sugar water. Now try to imagine someone whom your teacher would hate for being anal-retentive. That is the kind of person who works for a bureau of standards and measurement. — Sam Kean

Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs' vital organs the wrong color. — Sam Kean

Great literature remains great when it says new things to new generations, and the loops of a knot quite nicely parallel the contours and convolutions of Carroll's plot anyway.What's more, he probably would have been delighted at how this whimsical branch of math invaded the real world and became crucial to understanding our biology. — Sam Kean

The humped bladderwort has yellow, snapdragon-like flowers, and it's actually carnivorous, capable of trapping and eating not just insects but even tadpoles and tiny fish. — Sam Kean

I think it's a natural human tendency, when you read something, you tend to read a lot of your prejudices into it. And neuroscience is like a lot of disciplines - it has fashions; things change. — Sam Kean

Yet they enjoy the high. In the surest sign that selenium actually makes them go mad, cattle grow addicted to locoweed despite its awful side effects and eat it to the exclusion of anything else. It's animal meth. — Sam Kean

Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them. — Sam Kean

Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you'll find them. — Sam Kean

Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000. — Sam Kean

There are a few elements - especially platinum and palladium - that have the amazing ability to absorb up to 900 times their own volume in hydrogen gas. To get a sense of the scale there, that's roughly equivalent to a 250-pound man swallowing something the size of a dozen African bull elephants and not gaining an inch on his waistline. — Sam Kean

Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table - thallium, lead, and polonium - the nucleus of poisoner's corridor. — Sam Kean

Negative experiences can wire neurons together, too. — Sam Kean

So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn't touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder - the famed double helix. — Sam Kean

We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology. — Sam Kean

You're not supposed to interject feelings into science, but part of the reason it's so fascinating that we're 8 percent (or more) fossilized virus is that it's so creepy that we're 8 percent (or more) fossilized virus. — Sam Kean

Despite what you might guess, when monitoring your breathing, your body doesn't care whether you're inhaling enough oxygen. It cares only whether you're expelling enough carbon dioxide - that's the gas that sets off the panic button when you're suffocating. — Sam Kean

Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don't realize how thoroughly they've departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science. — Sam Kean

The mutated Marfan gene creates a defective version of fibrillin, a protein that provides structural support for soft tissues like blood vessels. Marfan victims often die young, in fact, after their aortas grow threadbare and rupture. — Sam Kean

Similarly deadly to small wriggling cells, if a bit more quackish, is vanadium, element twenty-three, which also has a curious side effect in males: vanadium is the best spermicide ever devised. Most spermicides dissolve the fatty membrane that surrounds sperm cells, spilling their guts all over. Unfortunately, all cells have fatty membranes, so spermicides often irritate the lining of the vagina and make women susceptible to yeast infections. Not fun. Vanadium eschews any messy dissolving and simply cracks the crankshaft on the sperm's tails. The tails then snap off, leaving — Sam Kean

One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminum, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey "eats" their utensils. — Sam Kean

The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents. — Sam Kean

A few years later, Mendeleev, now famous, divorced his wife and wanted to remarry. Although the conservative local church said he had to wait seven years, he bribed a priest and got on with the nuptials. This technically made him a bigamist, but no one dared arrest him. When a local bureaucrat complained to the tsar about the double standard applied to the case- the priest was defrocked-the tsar primly replied, I admit, Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev. — Sam Kean

In a vague way, I always knew neurosurgery was different - more delicate, more difficult, more demanding. After all, we say things like, 'I'm no brain surgeon,' for a reason. — Sam Kean

Genes are like the story, and DNA is the language that the story is written in. — Sam Kean

Every glass thermometer has subtle variations in the size and shape of the bulb at the bottom and the capillary tube inside, as well as variations in the width of gradations on the side. The compounded effect of these uncertainties is that each thermometer reads temperature slightly differently. — Sam Kean

Despite the disreputable company it keeps, bismuth is harmless. In fact, it's medicinal: Doctors prescribe it to soothe ulcers, and it's the 'bis' in hot-pink Pepto-Bismol. Overall, it seems like the most out-of-place element on the periodic table, a gentleman among scoundrels. — Sam Kean

Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different. — Sam Kean

Everywhere in the universe, the periodic table has the same basic structure. Even if an alien civilization's table weren't plotted out in the castle-with-turrets shape we humans favor, their spiral or pyramidal or whatever-shaped periodic table would naturally pause after 118 elements. — Sam Kean

Over the years, humans have managed to incorporate nearly every element, light and weighty, common and obscure, into our daily lives. And given how small atoms are and how many of them there are all around us, it's almost certain that your body has at least brushed against an atom of every single natural element on the periodic table. — Sam Kean

Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex - pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51. — Sam Kean

Among physicists and chemists, cold fusion - nuclear fusion at close to room temperature - enjoys a reputation about on par with creationism. — Sam Kean

On a submicro scale, pure diamond is billions of billions of carbon atoms bonded to one another. If you shrunk yourself down and stood inside the diamond, you'd see nothing but carbon in a perfect pattern in every direction. — Sam Kean

The idea of critical windows extends beyond just vision, of course: almost every system in the brain has a critical window when it needs to experience certain stimuli, or it won't get wired up properly. The most obvious example is language: if you don't learn a language early on, it's nigh impossible to become truly fluent. — Sam Kean

Junk DNA - or, as scientists call it nowadays, noncoding DNA - remains a mystery: No one knows how much of it is essential for life. — Sam Kean

Something funny certainly happens when palladium and platinum come into contact with hydrogen gas; it's one of the great mysteries still waiting to be solved on the periodic table. But it's quite a leap from 'something funny' to cold fusion. — Sam Kean

Acid strength is measured by the pH scale, with lower numbers being stronger, and in 2005 a chemist from New Zealand invented a boron-based acid called a carborane, with a pH of -18 — Sam Kean

Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature - in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes - would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible. — Sam Kean

Although it's the hub of the nervous system and the ultimate terminus of every nerve, the brain itself lacks enervation and therefore cannot feel pain. — Sam Kean

The most profound change that genetics brings about might not be scientific at all. It might be mental and even spiritual enrichment: a more expansive sense of who we humans are, existentially, and where we came from, and how we fit with other life on earth. — Sam Kean

DNA is a 'thing' - a chemical that sticks to your fingers. — Sam Kean

After about 1940, scientists generally stopped looking for elements in nature. Instead, they had to create them by smashing smaller atoms together. — Sam Kean

It's often meaningless to talk about a genetic trait without also discussing the environment in which that trait appears. Sometimes, genes don't work at all until the environment awakens them. — Sam Kean

Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There's almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn't leaned heavily on one animal or another. — Sam Kean

X-rays revealed that some people were born without a corpus callosum, and they seemed just fine. — Sam Kean

Some scientists claim - although these claims are contentious - that they can form deadly isomers with simple X-rays and that hafnium can multiply the power of these X-rays to an astounding degree, converting them into gamma rays up to 250 times more potent than the X-rays. — Sam Kean

Boron is carbon's neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of a diamond. But it has one fewer electron, so it can't quite form the same four perfect bonds. — Sam Kean

People adored Element 13's color and luster, which reminded them of the sparkle of gold and silver - a brand-new precious metal. In fact, aluminum became more precious than gold and silver in the 19th century because it was harder to obtain. — Sam Kean

Except for certain moments - when cells are dividing, for instance - chromosomes don't form compact, countable bodies inside cells. Instead, they unravel and flop about, which makes counting chromosomes a bit like counting strands of ramen in a bowl. — Sam Kean

Today alpha equals 1/137.0359 or so. Regardless, its value makes the periodic table possible. It allows atoms to exist and also allows them to react with sufficient vigor to form compounds, since electrons neither roam too freely from their nuclei nor cling too closely. This just-right balance has led many scientists to conclude that the universe couldn't have hit upon its fine structure constant by accident. — Sam Kean

Many different elements can form isomers, but only a few elements on the periodic table, like hafnium, can form isomers that last more than fractions of a second - and might therefore be turned into weapons. — Sam Kean

If you had to sum up chemistry in one sentence, it might be this: Atoms need to have full shells of electrons to feel satisfied, and different elements steal, shed, or borrow different numbers of electrons to achieve a full shell. — Sam Kean

When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron's twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion* does an energy-hungry star no good. Iron is the final peal of a star's natural life. — Sam Kean

Our evolution could have gone in different directions a lot of times. We could have gone extinct at some points. We might not have gotten our big brains, or Neanderthals might have made it while we did not. — Sam Kean

Scientists have continued to tinker with different elements and have learned new ways to store and deliver energy. — Sam Kean

Most mutations involve typos: Something bumps a cell's elbow as it's copying DNA, and the wrong letter appears in a triplet - CAG becomes CCG. — Sam Kean

When it comes to the periodic table, the United States really blew its chance to make a name for itself. If you look over a map of all the elements named for cities, states, countries, and continents, it's not surprising that European locales dominate the map. — Sam Kean

In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child. — Sam Kean

The emerging and vital truth isn't who is more Neanderthal than whom. It's that all peoples, everywhere, enjoyed archaic human lovers whenever they could. These DNA memories are buried deeper inside us than even our ids, and they remind us that the grand saga of how humans spread across the globe will need some personal, private, all-too-human amendments and annotations - rendezvous here, elopements there, and the commingling of genes most everywhere. — Sam Kean

As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth - food, dentist's tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever - and if no one else was around, I'd talk anyway. — Sam Kean

One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king. — Sam Kean

Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells. — Sam Kean

People fluent in two languages can lose either one after trauma, since first and second languages* draw on distinct neural circuits. Language deficits can even interfere with math. We seem to have a natural "number circuit" in the parietal lobe that handles comparisons and magnitudes - the basis of most arithmetic. But we learn some things (like the times tables) linguistically, by rote memorization. So if language goes kaput, so too will those linguistically based skills. More strikingly, some people who struggle to string even three words together can sing just fine. — Sam Kean

The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever. — Sam Kean

Cancer is really a DNA disease ... We have these certain genes that prevent our cells from growing out of control at the expense of the body. And it's a pretty good, robust system. But if a couple of these genes fail, then that's when cancer starts, and cells start growing out of control. — Sam Kean

If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours. — Sam Kean

Most people, even most doctors, learn that the placenta is a nice, tight seal that prevents anything in the mother's body from invading the fetus, and vice-versa. That's mostly true. But the placenta doesn't seal off the baby perfectly, and every so often, something slips across. — Sam Kean

Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret. — Sam Kean

Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn't dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. Perhaps for this reason, antimony found heavy work as a medicine, although it's actually toxic. Mozart probably died from taking too much to combat a severe fever. — Sam Kean

We really should be grateful to the people who participate in research and allow certain details to be published about themselves. Because if they didn't, we wouldn't have nearly the understanding of the brain that we do. — Sam Kean

Jupiter instead cooled down below the threshold for fusion, but it maintained enough heat and mass and pressure to cram atoms very close together, to the point they stop behaving like the atoms we recognize on earth. Inside Jupiter, they enter a limbo of possibility between chemical and nuclear reactions, where planet-sized diamonds and oily hydrogen metal seem plausible. — Sam Kean

In some sense, what you might have suspected from the first day of high-school chemistry is true: The periodic table is a colossal waste of time. Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars. The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium. — Sam Kean

Brains, you see, vary a lot from person to person - they vary as much as faces do. — Sam Kean

Dr. Rush made patients ingest the solution until they drooled, and often people's teeth and hair fell out after weeks or months of continuous treatment. His "cure" no doubt poisoned or outright killed swaths of people whom yellow fever might have spared. Even so, having perfected his treatment in Philadelphia, ten years later he sent Meriwether and William off with some prepackaged samples. As a handy side effect, Dr. Rush's pills have enabled modern archaeologists to track down campsites used by the explorers. With the weird food and questionable water they encountered in the wild, someone in their party was always queasy, and to this day, mercury deposits dot the soil many places where the gang dug a latrine, perhaps after one of Dr. Rush's "Thunderclappers" had worked a little too well. — Sam Kean

All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth ... where the relative abundance of elements is quite different. — Sam Kean

Biologists summarize these hypothalamic duties as the "four F's" of animal behavior - feeding, fleeing, fighting, and, well, sexual congress. — Sam Kean

Animal vision - including human vision - is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. — Sam Kean

Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body's circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They're on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run. — Sam Kean

Since before even the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, human beings used the stars and seasons to track time and record their most important moments. Cesium severed that link with the heavens, effaced it just as surely as urban streetlamps blot out constellations. — Sam Kean

(Rutherford himself was fond of saying, "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting" - words — Sam Kean

The inability to trace DNA to actual diseases has serious consequences. As does the opposite problem - not being able to trace diseases back to DNA. — Sam Kean

Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry — Sam Kean

No one knows quite the reason, but surgically severing the corpus callosum can reduce the rate and intensity of seizures. So in the early 1960s, a few patients with severe epilepsy had their corpus callosums cut, turning them into split-brain people. — Sam Kean

Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits. — Sam Kean

A long iron rod rocketed straight through the very forefront of Phineas Gage's brain. It's kind of an unusual part of the brain: you can suffer pretty severe injuries to it and often walk away from the injury. It's not a part of the brain that's necessarily vital for your biological self. But it is very important for personality. — Sam Kean

Rope-a-dope boxers and quarterbacks and hockey enforcers continue to shake off concussions on the theory of no blood, no harm. But each concussion effectively softens up the brain and ups the chances of more concussions. After multiple blows, neurons start to die and spongy holes open up; people's personalities then disintegrate, leaving them depressed, diminished, suicidal. Four centuries have passed, but macho modern athletes* might as well trade pads for armor and go joust with — Sam Kean

If studying the periodic table taught me nothing else, it's that the credulity of human beings for periodic table panaceas is pretty much boundless. — Sam Kean

Alessandro Volta, an Italian count and the inspiration for the eponym "volt," demonstrated this back around 1800 with a clever experiment. Volta had a number of volunteers form a chain and each pinch the tongue of one neighbor. The two end people then put their fingers on battery leads. Instantly, up and down the line, people tasted each other's fingers as sour. — Sam Kean

The amygdala plays a crucial role in processing fear, and minus her two amygdalae, S.M. became unflappable. Studies of her are actually a hoot to read, since they basically consist of scientists concocting ever-more-elaborate ways of trying to scare her. — Sam Kean

The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there's a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself - as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, 'causes' fear. — Sam Kean

The irony is too rich not to point out. When arranging the different human races in tiers, from just below the angels to just above the brutes, smug racialist scientists of the 1800s always equated black skin with 'subhuman' beasts like Neanderthals. But facts is facts: pure Nordic Europeans carry far more Neanderthal DNA than any modern African. — Sam Kean

Those of us raised in modern cities tend to notice horizontal and vertical lines more quickly than lines at other orientations. In contrast, people raised in nomadic tribes do a better job noticing lines skewed at intermediate angles, since Mother Nature tends to work with a wider array of lines than most architects. — Sam Kean

Things look especially bleak for common killers such as diabetes and heart disease. Those ailments clearly have a genetic component. But when scientists survey genes looking for which mutations patients have in common, they come up empty. — Sam Kean

Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on. — Sam Kean